Slicing machines of the prior art comprise a rotating blade which either has a spiral cutting edge or a circular cutting edge and is mounted for planetary motion, and means to feed the product towards the blade so that upon each revolution or each gyration of the blade, one slice is cut from the face of the product. The means to feed the product may be a continuous conveyor but usually the slicer includes a fixed platform on which the product is placed and a feeding head which engages the rear face of the product and which urges it towards the blade. The feeding head is moved by a timing belt or by a lead screw driven by a stepping or variable speed electric motor.
Meat slicing machines have a common application in the meat industry. They serve to slice raw/cooked meat products like beef, bacon and ham, etc., into consumer usable portions. These portions may be selected by weight, size or number of slices. The trend today and indeed the demand is for fixed weight portions with a fixed number of slices per pack and at a fixed price.
The present slicing machines whilst very expensive fail to achieve fully the performance demanded by the meat industry. This is particularly true in the bacon processing industry where the endeavor is to produce packs of sliced rashers of even slice thickness to a fixed target weight. The present slicing machines' failure is due mainly in part to the varying dimensions/density factors that the raw materials presents.
More recently, slicing machines have been made more sophisticated by the inclusion downstream of the slicing machine of means to weigh a group of slices cut by the slicing machine, and then, in dependence upon the weight of this preceding group, vary the speed of movement of the product towards the blade by a feedback system to insure, as far as possible that each slice has a particular, predetermined weight. This apparatus is very complicated, and inevitably, there is some time lag between the cutting of a group of slices and the determination that the group has been cut too thickly or too thinly.
Further developments made use of the differences between pieces of meat products by weighing the piece and measuring its length to achieve its "weight per unit length". Further use has been made of the well-known fact that meat products have a "weight distribution curve" particular to the individual type of product.
Computer programs have been used to utilize such gathered information so as to produce "an anticipated weight distribution" for a particular product to be sliced, and to target a desired individual "slice weight". This is repeated until the required number of slices for the package weight is found. This system produces reasonable results but fails to produce a pack with uniform slice thicknesses within the package, and this is due to the fact that the system is designed to produce an individual slice weight by varying the individual slice thicknesses to accomplish this result.
A further disadvantage of the above system is the means to weigh the product. The operator is required to first place the meat on the platter (weighing scale) to register the weight, and then remove it and place it on the slicer table. This obviously entails double handling of the product.
It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide a meat slicing machine and method of use thereof for handling the variable factors of a given meat product relating to dimensions and density so as to satisfy the performance demands for fixed weight packages with a uniform slice thickness throughout the pack.